Senate

GOP, Grassley dig for dirt on Biden amid Trump indictment furor

by Alexander Bolton - 06/16/23 9:52 AM ET

GOP allies of former President Trump are digging for dirt on President Biden and other Democrats amid the former president’s indictment, this week turning to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is pushing claims about an influence peddling operation, drawing fierce denials from the White House.

The unverified claims involving Biden and his son Hunter Biden are murky, but are being aired by the 89-year-old Iowa Republican, who was invited to give a presentation Wednesday to the Senate Republican Steering Committee about the claims made by an unnamed foreign national.

Grassley doesn’t have much to go on, other than an FD-1023 form from the FBI stating that the unnamed foreign national claimed to have two recorded phone conversations with then-Vice President Biden and 15 recorded phone conversations with Hunter Biden, revealing what the Iowa senator described as an “alleged bribery scheme.”

Biden’s allies say Grassley is trying to recycle the unsubstantiated and debunked claims that former President Trump made before the 2020 election accusing Biden of doing political favors as vice president to help Hunter Biden’s business dealings connected to Ukraine.

“Republicans are once again reminding Americans they are doing Donald Trump’s political dirty work, and that tells you everything you need to know about the seriousness of these political stunts,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee.

“Congressional Republicans are openly admitting they’re peddling debunked conspiracy theories in an embarrassing attempt to improve their political prospects heading into 2024,” the spokesperson said.

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During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump and his supporters spread the claim that Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to halt an investigation of his son, who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for sitting on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

The Associated Press at the time described the allegation as “a widely discredited theory.”

Grassley doesn’t know if the phone recordings exist or if the FBI was able to track them down. But he says the FBI has been extremely reluctant to talk about the information contained in the document, despite it being unclassified.

Grassley, a senior member of Senate Judiciary Committee, and Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, are the only two Republicans on Capitol Hill who have read the unredacted version of the document.

Other GOP lawmakers have read a redacted version that blotted out reference to the claim by the unnamed foreign national.

“They asked me to make a presentation to the caucus,” Grassley said of his briefing. “I’ve read the unredacted version [of the FD-1023 form], so I know more than the members of the House Oversight Committee.

“The only judgment we’re trying to make is if the FBI is doing its work,” he said. “They haven’t communicated with me.”

Grassley also discussed the issue in detail during a speech on the Senate floor Monday.

“As I’ve repeatedly asked since going public with the existence of the 1023: What, if anything, has the Justice Department and FBI done to investigate?” he said.

The veteran lawmaker said he’s trying to get the FBI to share the FD-1023 form, a standard document that outlines a source’s allegations, more widely with the public and the media. According to the society of former special agents of the FBI, the FD-1023 is the form special agents use to record raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, this month said that the FBI and Justice Department under the leadership of then-Attorney General Bill Barr reviewed the allegations made by the unnamed foreign national and found they did not merit further investigation.

Raskin said the FD-1023 form that Grassley and Comer reviewed contained an allegation from the unnamed foreign national that relayed a conversation with another person and that the source could not corroborate the information.

Raskin dismissed the claim as “secondhand hearsay” and argued the “confidential human source said that he had no way of knowing about the underlying veracity of the things that he was being told,” according to a New York Times report.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) speaks to reporters outside the Capitol following a procedural vote regarding the Fiscal Responsibility Act on Wednesday, May 31, 2023.

NBC News, citing a senior law enforcement official, reported this month that the FBI and Scott Brady, then the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, reviewed the allegation in 2020 and found the bribery allegation wasn’t substantiated.

Republican senators say if any evidence emerges that Biden was involved in improper activity benefiting Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden lavishly to sit on its board, it could shake up the political landscape ahead of the 2024 election.

Some GOP senators are skeptical of the FBI’s and the Department of Justice’s handling of the allegations against the Bidens, even though it was the Trump Justice Department made the initial assessment that they did not warrant deeper investigation.

“I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history, but some Americans — many Americans — have a lost a lot of confidence in them,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who cited the controversial decision of then FBI Director James Comey to investigate both Hillary Clinton and Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

Republicans in the House and Senate who are aligned with Trump have dug into the argument that the FBI and Justice Department have been weaponized for political reasons.

Kennedy called on Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee “and tell us what’s going on.”

“If they say, ‘We’ve got the 1023, we’re investigating,’ I think you’ll see most people back off,” he said.

Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), another Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said GOP lawmakers want to know more about why Brady, the U.S. attorney, decided not to investigate the allegation.

“Why on earth, if you really think there’s no ‘there’ there, wouldn’t you answer the simple question about, how do you arrive at that decision?” Tillis said, summarizing a discussion among fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee on Thursday morning.

“If there’s an active investigation, we stand back, let the investigation go,” he said. “It’s not unprecedented to say, ‘Let’s just get the facts that allowed a U.S. attorney to not pursue it.”

FILE - U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee business meeting on Feb. 16, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. On Saturday, June 10, 2023, Republican delegates in North Carolina voted at their annual convention to censure Tillis for supporting policies that they said violate key tenets of the GOP platform. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee business meeting on Feb. 16, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)

Tillis said Republicans are “suspicious.”

“Maybe there is an active investigation [and] they don’t want that known,” he said. “Why don’t they resolve the issue by telling us the facts that led them to not move on.”

Still, even some Republican senators are skeptical of an anonymous claim that Biden was involved in a bribery scheme.

“I have known President Biden probably for 25 years. I like him, I respect him, I disagree with him more times than not, but if you ask me, ‘Is Joe Biden the type of guy who would take a $5 million bribe,’ my answer is, based on my experience, no,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said at a Judiciary Committee business meeting Thursday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) arrives to the Capitol for a procedural vote regarding a nomination on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. (Greg Nash)

Graham is the ranking member of the committee and has endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

Up until now, GOP senators have largely been content to leave the Biden investigation to Comer and other Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

But the slow progress, combined with mounting concerns over Trump’s legal problems, have spurred GOP senators look for ways to get more involved in pressing for the FBI to scrutinize Biden’s business dealings before winning the 2020 election.

One Republican senator familiar with internal conversations said Republican senators have barely talked among themselves about the 37-count indictment that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith unveiled against Trump last week.

Instead, they’re focusing on trying to level the political playing field by finding a “game changer” they hope will put scrutiny on Biden instead, the senator said.